But where tonight will your bed be?
Not surprising to have drawn this card after yesterday's imprisoned feeling from Father.
This is an interesting card. The door is open, but the door to what? If it's the door that covers the portcullis of this castle, it is a very ineffectual one, being so far away from the gate that it serves no purpose. Plus the key seems to have been left in it. So we have a door with the key in it standing wide open, and something lying on the path that may be the 'fetters' recently shed by the fleeing figure on the horse. Or maybe it's a whip that was used to scourge him. If you look close, there are two figures on that horse. Are two people fleeing? Did one save the other? It's enigmatic.
Not unlike our concepts of slavery and liberation. I was thinking yesterday... Who says work has to be fun? Who says you have to love your job? In the old days, people would have laughed you to scorn if you said, 'Do what you love or do nothing at all.' They'd have laughed as they made their coughing and miserable way to the coal mines or the cotton mills. Everyday working class people like me, they knew what work was. They knew the cost of keeping body and soul together. We don't know we're born these days, you know what I mean? We have it so good that we have to make up imaginary prisons in our minds. We don't know the first thing about real poverty or real hunger or real want. We know our 'versions' of these things -- but we don't know what it's like to leave a starving child on the side of the road because you can't carry it any longer and you can't stand to watch it die. We don't know anything about a 6 square foot shelter made of corrugated tin being an unattainable fantasy. We know nothing -- and it should make us look around and think twice.
I stumbled across this yesterday:
Wellbeing -- Being in a position where you have good physical and mental health, control over your day-to-day life, good relationships, enough money, and the opportunity to take part in the activities that interest you.
I thought very hard about every point in that definition, and I realise that on any given day, I can tick most of them, and the ones I don't tick, I've left blank because of something imaginary, something with no basis in the actual reality of the details of my life.
My First World problems embarrass me.
I enjoy such Liberation that I can indulge myself in making up ways to think I'm enslaved.
The key is in the door. The door is wide open. The gate is up. The path is golden. The sky is blue. It's time for me open my eyes.
I see your point. Yet, "control over your everyday life": working a job you hate might butt up against that... I guess, on the spiritual side, we can never control our circumstances, only how we respond to them. Still, I suppose I just feel that First World problems are nevertheless real. Just look at how they can stress people out, and that's a real thing, hormones and chemicals flooding our bodies, affecting us at many levels. Studies on alpha chimps and putting them in a new group so they're no longer alpha prove that stress is a real concern with real effects.
ReplyDeleteTrue, but a little perspective helps.
DeleteAnd I'm in control of my every day life. I just like my job. That doesn't mean I don't have control. There's a huge gap between not liking your job and having no free will. Not to acknowledge that is to ignore the reality of all the people in the world who are actually slaves. It shames me.
DeleteFair enough!
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